Cages - Softcover

McKean, Dave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1595823166 ISBN 13: 9781595823168

Publisher: Dark Horse, 2010

Synopsis

Dave McKean's Cages returns in a beautiful remastered edition! Best known for his collaborations with Neil Gaiman, McKean defied expectations with his stunning debut as writer and artist in Cages, winner of the Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album. Filled with complex characters, intriguing flights of fancy, and all the beautiful visuals you'd expect from the director of MirrorMask, Cages is McKean's magnum opus. It chronicles the intersecting lives of a painter, a writer, and a musician living in the same apartment building, and is a profound rumination on art, God, cats, and the cages we build for ourselves. Out of print for years, Cages is finally available again, painstakingly rescanned from the original art and redesigned from the ground up by McKean. This affordable softcover edition provides more readers than ever the opportunity to experience the graphic novel that Terry Gilliam calls "mesmerizing."

About this title

About the Author:

Dave McKean is best known for his regular collaboration with Neil Gaiman, during which he has created covers for every single issue and one-shot of Sandman, (now collected as Titan's The Sandman: Dustcovers), Violent Cases, Signal to Noise, Black Orchid and Mr. Punch. Also celebrated for his work with Grant Morrison on the classic Batman: Arkham Asylum, Cages represents McKean's first major solo work.

From Publishers Weekly:

Best known for his work with Neil Gaiman, McKean is also an accomplished cartoonist in his own right. This is his magnum opus to date: an immense, pulsing graphic novel that's also a treatise on art, creativity and the uses and misuses of technique. Originally serialized between 1990 and 1996 (and collected in 1998), it's been out of print for several years. The book's plot is fairly rudimentary: a painter, a writer and a musician who live in the same apartment building find their lives intersecting. But the book's gradual shift from literalism to fanciful allegories and stories-within-stories mostly serves as the springboard for a visual tour de force. For most of the book, McKean restricts himself to wobbly, jagged two-tone pen-and-ink drawings, occasionally in the manner of Egon Schiele. But he often signals shifts in storytelling mode by switching media or style (to ink-wash brushwork, airbrushed photography, white-on-black "woodcuts," bold near-abstractions or whatever seems appropriate); when the artwork erupts into full-color paintings and collages, the effect is explosive. Even when the story falters or drifts into endless philosophical chitchat, McKean's artwork saves the day. His characters, built out of crazily bent lines and splatters, have perfectly choreographed body language, and his daring visual experiments serve the ideological goals of his writing.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Dark Horse
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1595823166
• ISBN 13: 9781595823168
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496